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“The Bluest Eye” was riveting and provoking. It caused my mind to ache and my neck to stiffen. Toni Morrison’s words are large translucent cells, once you enter the heaven or hell of them, you stand there, transfixed gazing out at the real world with disinterested eyes. The compact bacchanalia of many black somebodies’ sorrowful, brain washed, conditioned lives, pushes you to the brink of insanity. You know this woman , this deranged soul , this dipsomaniac ; you have heard stories of him from your wisening mother , which she heard from her grandmother, because, her own mother was a victim , similar to those of Morrison’s silken embroidery of viscous locutions. For a few moments, YOU are the character . You feel their pain, the normalcy in their abnormal pathology , the violence in the selfish , misguided, deluded breaths.

Then, its over, and Morrison , with a passionate pen reminds you that this is not your life , but someone else’s . The pain demands to be felt, but its not yours to succumb to.

And you’re okay, but not as blind, for those blue eyes are lucid and piercing in their intent.

My best friend , with her newly growing umber locks, warned me to hurry and catch my balance in love …to stop falling for that marvelous french boy, before it was to late. We all knew that he loved his home , in the once french ruled islands of the Caribbean. But I thought he also loved me, or at least cared. It felt like he did in sporadic moments , when I’d be so ineffably pissed with him that he could sense it, as I passed him wordlessly in the halls of our small miserable school. He would pull me into a hug and ask me what was wrong, or come sit shyly besides me and coax my pen from my journal to explain once more what I knew shortly after I met him…his life was a maelstrom of everything wrong that had ever happened to a kid (or perhaps in my adoration of him, I am too sympathetic) . But I listened, because the tune of his voice is my favorite melody and the absence of it ,for too long, springs tears in my ducts and a dull ache, made vibrant by the histrionics of my imagination, in my heart.

But, now Easter vacation has come and he’s gone back finally to visit the land that cradled his infancy and blossoming adolescence. He told me , un-quiveringly , on the last day of school, that he wasn’t absolutely certain he was coming back. So I sighed. But, I didn’t believe him at all. I thought I knew he’d be back for sure, for his education and for me. But now, as the days go on, five days exactly have passed, my certainty wanes . How many times had he complained of Trinidad and longed for his home’s sun?

What did this country really hold for him? He says he needs no one, that he’s alright with being alone. But I think he’s just inured to the old loneliess that consumed him, he learned to mask it ,and move on with his existence . But what of a life, that goes past teenage years, passes smoking mary`jane and distrusting everyone? Am I really supposed to believe that he wants no more from life? I didn’t believe so, but now I feel that he might become so intoxicated with the possibility of getting his old life back..it’ll all slip away. He’ll forget education and me, while under the haze of marijuana and rum. Or maybe, it won’t be the same.

The maybe is what I hold to. Maybe, he’ll think of how I adore him and know its not weakening to be loved, but empowering. That’s all I really want him to know.

He whispered as the nurses dragged his dead mother away, forgetting one of her amputated limbs. He cried soundlessly as the army troopers stepped over his strategically wounded father, a “mis-aimed” bullet through his defiant brain. A nurse played with his hair, another wiped his parents’ blood from his starved sunken in chest.But no one seemed to feel the pain that he did, because their families, mothers and fathers ,were safe back home. And this child was just one of the few who would die today. The nurses laid him down on the hard chair, expecting him to fall asleep. And he did very deeply..never to wake again.

Only the photographer, whose camera’s lens was his only expression listened and heard. And didn’t let the boy’s words go unheard, as the cries of his country did.

You were going to leave anyway. I decided that hurting you would make it easier on myself. Is it the loneliness I can’t stand, or the missing of you that breaks my heart?Amazing that my attempt to avoid heart break is breaking my heart.

Avoiding earthquakes in my soul.Ignoring rivers in my eye.Smiling while suffocating under loneliness. Aha. I’m not allowed to feel pain, am I? Once you break the soul of the one who trusted you, sympathy is not something you can expect to get.

I’m sorry . I’m sorry for all the things that I have said.

Like ocean waves to the shore, your words are always coming back to me.

If the world was lace and pearls..all of the prettiest things , would we be happier?

Would we stop killing because the shine of sunlight on a pink pearl was too lovely to spill blood on?

Would boys stop making girls cry because lace is too pretty to spoil?

Would hunger pains stop in the stomachs of men and children because truffles and hot chocolate are abundant?

I doubt that pretty tastes and things will stop world hunger, rape and pain. Yet everyday we see shinier buildings and expensive dresses. Sitting near those buildings are dying children. Why beautify a world that is dying in pain slowly?

He didn’t realize that he had strayed from his subterranean domicile until a hand-less yellow stick burned his molish nose. He turned his head blindly towards the unseen sun, a large baking pot, and hid his head in the darkness of the burrow he emerged from. The sun, this novice giver of warmth, warmed the hairs on his rear end. He wiggled in his comfort and fell asleep.It was only when a chilled quick draft shot under his hind legs, punching his chin, did he start awake. He stumbled around, to find his warmth-giver departed…long departed for the grass beneath him had also cooled. Sniffling, the lost mole thought something like this: Well the darkness from which I was born, was a constant friend, although cold-hearted earth was her soul-mate, she never left me alone. This new ‘friend’ I have made is a sly one, she slips away just when I entrust my back to her. To the one that lasts, I shall return to.”

But when he recoiled into the moonless dark, and found his constant shiver-inducing companion, he longed for nothing more than radiance. He couldn’t help but wonder if she had returned in search of him, or if she even loved him the way he had come to adore her. When the curiosity and yearning had filled his entire being, he made his way back to the surface, desperation for her driving him on. He broke through the Darkness, though she tried to make him stay with her familiarity and her incessant dark ways. He strove towards his new love, wondering…forever worrying that she wouldn’t be there …but praying to his God that she was.

And she was.

She bathed him in her rays for hours, as if her only thought was of him , his fury body and hairless face. He thought : I MUST be the one she loves. Feel how she caresses me, and heats up my tender insides, dispelling all of the coldness therein. I love her.

But again ,she left. He waited for her, though his heart ached in her absence. But she always came back , sometimes though, as time progressed, her warmth seemed reluctant or hardly there. But he stayed , forever longing for the warmth she had given in the beginning.

Never did he remember her, the darkness, who stayed where he could find her, even after he left. He was a boy-like mole.

I dreamt that cool is defined by the tighter the pants are and the bigger that ass that shapes it.

Forget the early promotion because my grades are high, if I wasn’t getting high. And nothing’s wrong with blazing, but to do doesn’t automatically make me amazing.

I refuse to conform to a society that tells me I’m lame if i’m not exactly the same.
One that slaps you in the face if you smile too big at the world. One that calms your bright spirit and lets your dark side loose…

A world run by people who stand behind the noose. And if you think you’re better because your lighter, please know that you suffer from the same lynching as your darker brother. You’ve been given what seems to be elevation, but remember all thats high, must fall . They’ve fed to you these stereotypes that beautify the whitest skin and demote the chocolate flesh.

When I awoke, I heard children screaming out for freedom through thick clouds of smoke, from under snapbacks and from behind the leaders of their cliques. And I cried with them, deep in my heart , so no one would see we aren’t pleased.